Useful Site of the Week – Hometown Locator

With info on 166,000 cities, towns, neighborhoods and subdivisions, www.hometownlocator.com provides detailed community profiles and links to vital information.  Look up any hometown to find hospitals, libraries, golf courses, newspaper and radio stations, crime statistics, things to do, historical landmarks, elected representatives and more.

Reference Question of the Week

Okay, you top-notch Reference Librarians, name the seven hills of Rome.

One answer per librarian.  So seven of you better come up with an answer.

LK

 

Magnifying Glass Goes Digital

New digital magnifying devices for people with macular degeneration, diabetes and other vision problems are being released this month. They offer much larger displays than their optical forefathers, as well as advanced features. 

“The SenseView Duo, with a liquid crystal display 4.3 inches wide, stores up to 20 images — for instance, a screen shot of a railway timetable. Users can enlarge the image, then scan through it, moving up and down or left and right to read all the information.”

Good News from Mango Languages

I fielded a call from a representative of Mango Languages, our new online language learning service. He wanted to speak to Denise, but relayed the message to me when I explained she wasn’t in. In short, he said that because of all the groundwork that Denise had done in getting Mango online to work for us, the door had been opened for SCLS to get on board with a number of other libraries. As a token of their appreciation, Mango has decided to start our actual billing in August, giving us the months we use it until then gratis.

Thank you Denise for the good karma!

Alan

Screen protectors

The tech. dept. has removed the screen protectors from the computers in the Reference area (tto hard to keep clean), so be mindful of not damaging the screens with your digits!!

The Rain

Rain, rain go away please come back another day, maybe tomorrow.

By Karen Filippone

Spring Cleaning of the G: drive

Alan sent around a memo reminding staff to clean out any olf files you have stored on the G: drive, especially “personal” files which may contain pictures and other private stuff. If you want something burned onto a CD or DVD, the tech dept. can help you with that. The more files on the server the slower those servers work, so get to cleaning!!  LK

Survival Tips #2 – Kitchen Edition

These tips may not help you survive, but if they help out in the kitchen, isn’t that just as useful?

Visit The Life Hackery for these and many more life tips.

“Indespensible Links” from Refdesk

I’m not sure I’d call these links indespensible, but there are certainly some useful links that are worth checking out.

Survival Tips – Post #1

The Coke Can and Chocolate Bar – and 8 other techniques that just might save your life one day.  Straight from the “Art of Manliness” blog, here are 9 ways to start a fire without matches.